Knights of Columbus

In this Sept. 14, 2001 photo, the pope prays for the victims of the terrorist attacks.

On May 22, 2002, Pope John Paul II declared, “I have come to Azerbaijan as an ambassador of peace. As long as I have breath within me I shall cry out: ‘Peace, in the name of God!’ And when word joins word, a chorus is born, a symphony, which will spread to every soul, quench hatred, disarm hearts.”

For John Paul II this is fundamental: Peace comes from truth and from the love of truth. This truth and the love for it is now and must always be a source of unity among people and never a sign of division.

Truth is one and the same for everyone, or it does not exist at all. If there is no universal truth, but only opinions imposed by the strong on the weak as if they were truths, then there is only a “so-called” peace maintained by the powerful, and the dream of peace shared by the weak. We know what political peace means, whether it be Pax Romana, Pax Germanica, Pax Britannica or Pax Americana. We know little about the peace proclaimed to all people by the angel who appeared to the poor shepherds and announced the truth shining from the baby lying in a manger.

For John Paul II, peace is a gift of truth, to which all people are entitled and from which the identity of all people comes. For this reason, John Paul II’s fight for peace starts by reminding us that the return to truth is like the return to one’s family home. Yet there are men who bend the truth to advance their own interests and who will resort to violence. Consequently, those who fight for truth to bring about peace must learn how to suffer for justice. Justice meets peace within love: the Lord “will speak peace unto his people…mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other” (Ps 85). Love, therefore, must also know how to suffer. The road to truth, freedom and peace leads through the Beatitudes, the blessings of the Sermon on the Mount. The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon two years ago this Sept. 11 remind us that we live not in peace but in a state which St. Augustine called the “shadow of peace” (umbra pacis). It is the peace of evil men (pax iniquiorum).

This “shadow of peace” affects the lives of individuals and societies. It functions as if it were the peace that people dream of and desire. But this “shadow” becomes longer as men move farther from the “sun” of truth, freedom, love and justice. In the process they alter the very meaning of these concepts, severing their connection with reality. Men become dependent on personal interests and, without much resistance, mere opinions come to rule their lives. Within such a society, any opinion can function as if it were truth, any judgment can be deemed just, and any manipulation of another can be defined as love.

Some may insist that when men repeatedly call a lie the truth, the lie becomes the truth. That this way of thinking is a source of war is apparent in the ascendancy of the Nazi regime in Germany. But peace can occur only where all men look toward the same truth — a truth that unites them as one pilgrim nation. The truth of each person exists within that person and shapes the drama of his or her identity and personal history. This unique personal truth meets the truth of all other persons in the consciousness of God. As such, each human life and human destiny is present to God who is ordering it into a meaningful and beautiful whole. In this divine landscape, everything aims to the One. As St. Thomas Aquinas wrote, “The ultimate end of the universe is Truth.” From this truth derives all duties and rights of man — and especially the duty to seek peace.

John Paul II understands that wars are conceived inside of us. The man who would create peace must fight for it especially within himself. That is why peace is so difficult. When a man is defeated in this fight within himself, he becomes an ally of the strong who continue to wage war, using arms as well as the “shadow of peace.” If the defeated seeks revenge, he too becomes unjust because he does not treat the winner as a human being, that is, he does not forgive him through love. From this injustice, from this lack of love, are planted the seeds from which a new war will arise. It is difficult to be free while living under the oppression of the winner, but it is even more difficult to do so and not to seek to crush the winner out of a desire for revenge.

Abraham and the prophets were looking for witnesses of truth, who were just men who sought this difficult freedom. Only the witnesses and martyrs of truth can help truth save the world from destruction. They are the “salt” that preserves the world; they are the “yeast” that allows men to develop in a meaningful and harmonious way (see also Matt 5:13; Luke 13:21). These martyrs of truth do not lose all hope because they sense like St. Augustine the anxious heart in every man. “Our heart, O Lord, cannot be quieted till it finds repose in You” (Inquietum est cor nostrum, Domine, donec requiescat in Te). This anxious heart leads man to God. The anxious heart points man in the direction toward true peace. Therefore, the problem of peace is not a problem that we can solve by ourselves. The problem of peace is the problem of the mystery of man’s belonging to God who is present in the truth of every man. Peace is the mystery of our personal identity. And mysteries are not solved the way problems are solved; mysteries can only be lived.

God alone can solve the mystery of man’s anxious heart. He does so by giving himself to man. Peace is such a gift. The problem of peace is that man has not yet learned to accept it as a gift of God. “If you only knew what God is offering and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me something to drink,’ you would have been the one to ask, and he would have given you living water” (John 4:10). The gift of peace cannot be identified with a specific object, one that can be reproduced and owned. Peace happens within man when he cares for the truth that appears within him and within other men. Peace permeates the man who seeks truth. But asking for the gift of peace, without also demanding truth, only brings us further away from true peace. In other words, peace has a moral character. Man has not only the right to peace, but also, and perhaps above all, the duty to take care of peace.

It may seem that John Paul II has the task of being a fireman of sorts, whose mission is to travel from continent to continent to extinguish fires. It is a difficult task because these fires start in man’s heart and conscience, and it is there that they have to be extinguished. John Paul II, pilgrim for peace, speaks to the hearts and consciences of all.

Peace is truly the essence of John Paul II’s mission as pope. For him, the truth of peace is Christ while the sign of this peace is the Church. As he explained in his 1986 encyclical on the Holy Spirit: “Since the way of peace passes in the last analysis through love and seeks to create the civilization of love, the Church fixes her eyes on him who is the love of the Father and the Son, and in spite of increasing dangers she does not cease to trust, she does not cease to invoke and to serve the peace of man on earth” (Dominum et Vivificantem, 67).

John Paul II knows very well, as he noted in his Jan. 1 message in 1984, that peace and human justice are fragile. “Peace is fragile, and injustice abounds.” In 1986 he said: “Peace…is threatened in so many ways and with such unforeseeable consequences that we must endeavor to provide it with secure foundations.” Ten years later, he noted that even if “at times peace appears a truly unattainable goal…we must not lose heart.”

The pope in particular does not lose heart. Wherever he senses and sees fear, he repeats the words of Jesus, “Peace I bequeath to you, my own peace I give you, a peace which the world cannot give, this is my gift to you. Do not let your hearts be troubled or afraid” (John 14:27).

Peace takes place among men who are at the “service of truth.” Everyone has the duty to serve truth. We can serve truth by living in a dialogue with others. To learn how to do this, it is not necessary to study textbooks. St. Francis of Assisi and Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who are cited by John Paul II as examples, lived in dialogue with others because they opened themselves to the truth of the Gospel. In this way they were able to reach human hearts.

We are all responsible for peace. The motto of St. Benedict written in the prologue to his Rule — “Seek peace: pursue it!” — is directed to us all. John Paul II observes: “Peace can be decided by a few men,” but it “presupposes a joint work of all.” The solidarity required for peace requires each person to create interior peace. The person who is not at peace within himself cannot further peace among others. Peace is each person living for the other. For John Paul II, the person of Christ is a peace of all living for all. Where this communion of persons is not present, no one can be sure of another, and no nation can rely on another.

When John Paul II says, “Open up new doors to peace. Do everything in your power to make the way of dialogue prevail over that of force,” he asks politicians to guarantee the right as well as the duty of citizens to seek the truth. He asks them to cultivate politics, and hence he asks them to pursue a politics of a culture that leads to peace.

He also tells us that peace happens only where man’s conscience is respected. “If you want peace, respect the conscience of every person.” If you want peace, live according to your conscience, that is, live in freedom! “To be free is to be able to choose and to want to choose; it is to live according to one’s conscience.” Politics that do not respect freedom of conscience and of religion result in a denial of the foundations of peace and,therefore, ultimately lead to war.

The politics of peace are difficult. In his Angelus message on Jan. 20, 2002, John Paul II said, “Following the tragic attack last Sept. 11, always present in your memory, and given the risk of new conflicts, believers are aware of the urgency to intensify their prayer for peace, because this is, above all, a gift of God.” But to truly pray for peace is not easy. St. Stephen created peace when he asked God to forgive those who were stoning him. Only by forgiving can we hope that we also will be forgiven.

But to forgive does not mean to forget. If we forget the tragic day of Sept. 11, we may not even notice when we will start hurting others. Those who forget Auschwitz or the Siberian camps risk building them again. But memory alone is also dangerous. During Mass at the site of the Nazi concentration camp at Birkenau on June 7, 1979, John Paul II said: “I go down on my knees in this Golgotha of today’s world.” We have to remember the Golgothas of every murder while on our knees. Any other type of memory can be a source of war. A prayerful memory is born in hearts that are rooted, as the Holy Father says, “in a spirit that believes in the possibility of reconciliation and in peace.”

Peace is our promised future. We work toward it in times of war, following in our hope the words of the prophet: “They will hammer their swords into ploughshares and their spears into sickles. Nation will not lift sword against nation, no longer will they learn how to make war. But each man will sit under his vine and fig tree with no one to trouble him” (Mic 4:3-4). “For God is a God not of disorder but of peace” (1 Cor 14:33).

Stanislaw Grygiel is a professor at the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family in Rome.